Lyndale Avenue Reconstruction in the Wedge: What’s Changing

Ask anyone who bikes, walks a dog, or hunts for parking along Lyndale Avenue South in the Wedge, and they'll tell you the same thing: this street has been "about to change" for three years now. Hennepin County started gathering feedback on rebuilding the corridor between Franklin Avenue and 31st Street back in August 2023. That stretch happens to be the entire eastern edge of Lowry Hill East, which means every resident who crosses Lyndale to get to Whittier, catches a bus at one of its stops, or just walks the dog past the co-op has a stake in what the county eventually builds.

Here's what most coverage of this project misses: the target for actually breaking ground has moved more than once, and sources don't even agree on where it sits today. Some of the earliest public materials tied to the project pointed to a 2026 start. By last fall, coverage citing the county had shifted that to 2027, a date one local outlet was still reporting as recently as this spring. But the county's own current project pages now list 2028, subject to change. Whichever number turns out to be right, the pattern is the same: this has slipped later every time it's been restated, not sooner. The design, meanwhile, is still very much in motion.

What's actually on the table, block by block

The project covers streetlights, curbs, traffic signals, sidewalks, pavement, and the utilities underneath all of it, the kind of ground-up rebuild that only happens once every few decades. It doesn't treat the corridor as one uniform street. The block just south of Franklin Avenue, the segment that borders the Wedge's northern edge, gets a dedicated northbound transit lane meant to cut delays for bus riders heading downtown, plus a new separated sidewalk and two-way bikeway that ties into the existing bikeway north of Franklin. Further south, where the corridor runs through the Lyn-Lake business district, the plan instead narrows the roadway slightly to add green space and slow traffic, while preserving mature trees and keeping curb space open for people visiting businesses. Two different treatments for two different stretches of the same street.

None of this is finalized. As of this spring, the project sat in the second of four planned rounds of public engagement, with a third round scheduled for this fall specifically to gather feedback on corridor layout details like the bike lane and transit lane placements described above. A fourth and final round, expected next spring, is when the county plans to settle on a preferred layout before locking in a final design roughly a year after that. In other words, the window for weighing in on the details that will define this street for decades is open right now, this fall, not whenever construction eventually starts.

The pushback has a name and a meeting date

This spring, the design fight got organized. In May, a group calling itself Vibrant Lyndale, put together by Andrea Corbin and several people connected to the Uptown Association, held a meeting at the Uptown VFW to lay out concerns from business owners along the corridor. The objections were specific: proposed medians could obstruct emergency vehicles and block customers from turning left into parking lots, and the boulevard space freed up by the new bike lane might not leave enough room to store plowed snow in winter.

Whether those concerns reshape the final design is still an open question. What's clear is that the businesses lining Lyndale aren't waiting to find out what construction looks like whenever it arrives. They're trying to shape the blueprint now, while this fall's round of feedback is still open.

What a rebuilt Lyndale actually costs a small business

The clearest illustration of what's at stake came from further south on the corridor, where French Meadow Bakery co-owner Steve Shapiro spoke about his Lyndale Avenue location and the CC Club bar next door, which French Meadow also owns. Shapiro pointed to his company's other location on Grand Avenue in St. Paul, undergoing a similarly disruptive reconstruction this year, as a preview of what to expect. "We're expecting business to be down 50% at our Grand Avenue location," he said.

Hennepin County has said it's trying to avoid that level of disruption on Lyndale by rebuilding one side of the street at a time rather than tearing up the full width at once, an approach the county says it's borrowing from the ongoing Hennepin Avenue reconstruction, where the entire width of the street has been torn up in active construction zones. Whether that one-side-at-a-time approach actually happens on Lyndale hasn't been decided. It depends partly on how the utility work underground gets sequenced, which is still being worked out.

For a Wedge resident, this is the detail worth holding onto: whatever year construction finally starts, that date has only moved in one direction so far, later, and the businesses along this street are actively lobbying to change how the disruption gets phased, not just what the finished street looks like.

The corridor's context: what's already changed this year

The Lyndale project is unfolding against a neighborhood that's been rebuilding some of its own civic infrastructure in 2026. The Lowry Hill East Neighborhood Association, known locally as LHENA, backed the reinstatement of the Uptown Farmers Market this year, bringing Thursday afternoon vendors back to the neighborhood after a gap. LHENA also supported the third year of Uptown Porchfest, the neighborhood's front-yard music festival that ran that Saturday afternoon in mid-August, spreading small stages and coolers of lemonade across porches on both sides of the Wedge.

None of that is directly tied to the Lyndale redesign, but it says something about the muscle this neighborhood has for organizing around its own public space. The same association that coordinates a monthly Food Share program and volunteer-run cleanups between April and November is the kind of civic body that shows up to comment maps and open houses when a county reconstruction project threatens to reroute how people move through the neighborhood for a decade or more.

What to actually do with this

If you live along or near Lyndale Avenue in the Wedge, the calendar that matters isn't whatever year construction eventually starts. It's this fall, when the county's third round of engagement asks specifically for feedback on corridor layout details, the bike lane placement, the transit lane, the medians that Vibrant Lyndale has already flagged. The county's BeHeardHennepin project page is where those updates land first, and it's worth a bookmark if you have opinions about left turns or snow storage that you'd rather share before the layout is set.

In the meantime, the corridor keeps functioning as it always has: a working street lined with small businesses, bus stops, and driveways, with more runway before anything on the ground changes than most residents assumed a year ago. Use it.

Curious how infrastructure projects like this one factor into buying or selling timing in the Wedge or elsewhere in Minneapolis? Erin Sjöquist has spent years reading these neighborhoods block by block, redesign plans included. Reach out anytime you want a straight answer about what's actually changing around here and what it means for you.